Leading a retreat in Transylvania with your mother and mother in-law

Last morning practice of the retreat and that means one thing-inversions! An inversion loosely means any posture where the head is lower than the heart, like downward dog or a standing forward fold. But in today’s class we would be exploring headstands. 

This pose is one that has two camps. One camp is the yes I will conquer this pose lets go OR hell no this is NOT happening. Practicing inversions like headstands require a believe in oneself, a desire to push beyond your box and trust the teachers and others in the room. We always start the class with a powerful meditation and lots of strengthening work to help people understand the muscle groups needed to achieve the posture. It’s also important that you do this at the end of a retreat because we work in groups to support, guide and help the feel going up-this trust has been building throughout the week and people are more easily ready to put their safety in the hands of others. 

When you do finally go upside down, aided or one your own there is an epic release. The pride and admiration for yourself can create tears and whoops of joy. No matter your age, your size or your ability you can accomplish something you’ve never done before. It may not look the same as the others in the room but remember it’s progress for your body-no one else’s!

There has been one person on this retreat that I have not been able to reach on any kind of emotional sense so far and that is my mom. Margit is sweet as pie. She is loved far and wide and when my friends hear she is coming to visit they start booking visits in. She doesn’t often show any kind of anger or annoyance and if she ever does it often only displays as disappointment. Once you disappoint Margit you aren’t likely to do it again. 

BUT my mom doesn’t like to go into great detail about anything that is too upsetting and will resign herself to saying that it will all get better and smile. She doesn’t like sad or upsetting movies either. Whilst everyone was writing about their pasts, discussing traumas from childhood and adolescence my mom sat quiet not sharing anything. It’s not that she doesn’t have anything to share, but there’s a block, a resistance to starting to unearth her darker stories.

Over breakfast mom got stressed because she thought she had forgotten to pay the massage therapist the previous day and felt really embarrassed, she didn’t need to pay because the bills would come at the end of the retreat, but she didn’t know this and she suddenly burst into tears. I grabbed her porridge and we went to my room to chat. This is not what you’re crying about. My mom was abandoned in Hungary by her mother when she was a child. 

Left with her uncle expecting to never see her mother again. She never knew her dad and still doesn’t know anything substantial about him. She was eventually reunited with her mother in a refugee camp in Ugolslavia where they stayed, infested with bed bugs, for almost a year. Eventually they would immigrate on a ship to Canada. Her life did not improve here. 

At the hands of an alcoholic and abusive father my mother would have to protect herself and her younger half brother, often running into the streets at night where it was safer than at home. My mom has only ever shared snippets with me. On this retreat she burst out crying telling me she struggled to go back there mentally because it just makes her cry and she doesn’t want to put it onto her daughter. None of her scars are visible but they all show in her insecurities and lack of confidence…lack of belonging. Her insecurities highlighted by a silly mistake she thought she had made, these negative beliefs always bubbling there on the surface. In this moment, on the last morning of the retreat, I had a real, deep and brutally honest conversation with my mom. And in that moment a part of my mom was healed because she got to release some of her demons.